Word: donnish
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...North London study, a sunny garret heaped with books and files, Warner, 52, comes across as rather more donnish than Madonnaish. Ever since that Virgin Mary book, however, she has built a genre-defying career by filling in the gaps between high art and low, merging an encyclopedic knowledge of art history, mythology and language to put her original spin on such subjects as Joan of Arc, the female form and, most famously, fairy tales. Her 1994 From the Beast to the Blonde was a sort of search for Mother Goose: a look at the (mainly female) tellers of fairy...
...tell a microwave from a VCR. One day, by mistake, he watches a trashy teenpic called Hotpants College 2 and finds, he thinks, a reason for loving. In an actor named Ronnie Bostock (Jason Priestley), Giles sees all the beauty of the ages in one glorious package. The donnish writer buys fan mags, rents B-minus films, immerses himself in the detritus of Bostockiana. To your eyes Ronnie might seem a bland dreamboat, but that is part of the fun in this delicious comedy. And part of the truth: for it is a mark of obsession that it fixes...
...Yorkshire butcher, Bennett may be wishing against wish for a good honest job that bloodies the hands. Instead, this Oxford grad with a fretful, donnish air is stuck with his reputation as Britain's most endearing man of letters. A reluctant star since the early '60s, when he beguiled London and Broadway with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller in the Beyond the Fringe comedy revue, Bennett has proved to be the surprise marathoner of that dazzling quartet. In his plays (A Question of Attribution, The Wind in the Willows), film scripts (A Private Function, Prick Up Your Ears...
...videos, cookie-dough Haagen-Dazs, Harvey Wallbangers, Beauty and the Beast trinkets, tickets to a Madame Tussaud's waxworks -- and doesn't involve pornography, switchblades or free- base pipes, the powers that be want it on the new 42nd Street. "We're after vulgar heterogeneity," says the sly, donnish and influential architect Robert A.M. Stern, who drafted the new guidelines with the sly, perverse and influential graphic designer Tibor Kalman. Incredibly, they have persuaded the state and city to get behind an authentically populist spectacle, a potential mix of tourist traps and hip outlets, mom-and-pop shops and name...
...declining years, Moore had become a querulous termagant. Gresham was an assertive "battle-axe" (Lewis' term) whose brassiness embarrassed his donnish cronies. Lewis' hagiolaters seem almost as uncomfortable with these relationships as he was. Yet both women were central to his life's pilgrimage: Moore as nurturer, Gresham as stimulus to erotic feelings long suppressed. Sainthood, Wilson suggests, is all in the beholder's eye. If Lewis deserved the honor, his love for these two unlikely consorts was a reason...